She transmitted the last of the messages, just as Alex arrived at her airlock.
"Permission to come aboard, ma'am," he called cheerfully, as she opened the lock for him. He ran up the stairs two at a time, and when he burst into the main cabin, she told herself that fashions would surely change, soon. He was dressed in a chrome yellow tunic with neon-red piping, and neon-red trousers with chrome-yellow piping. Both bright enough to hurt the eyes and dazzle the pickups, and she was grateful she could turn down the intensity of her visual receptors.
"How was your reunion?" she asked, once his clothes weren't blinding her.
"There weren't more than a half dozen of them," he told her, continuing through the hall and down to his own cabin. He pitched both his bags on his bed, and returned. "We just missed Chria by a hair. But we had a good time."
"I'm surprised you didn't come back with a hangover." He widened his eyes with surprise. "Not me! I'm the Academy designated driver, or at any rate, I make sure people get on the right shuttles. Never touch the stuff, myself, or almost never. Clogs the synapses." Tia felt irrationally pleased to hear that "So, did you miss me? I missed you. Did you have enough to do?" He flung himself down in his chair and put his feet up on the console." I hope you didn't spend all your time reading Institute papers."
"Oh," she replied lightly, "I found a few other things to occupy my time."
The comlink was live, and Alex was on his very best behavior, including a fresh, and only marginally rumpled, uniform. He sat quietly in his chair, the very picture of a sober Academy graduate and responsible CS brawn.
Tia reflected that it was just as well she'd bullied him into that uniform. The transmission was shared by Professor Barton Glasov y Verona-Gras, head of the Institute, and a gray-haired, dark-tunicked man the professor identified as Central Systems Sector Administrator Joshua Elliot-Rosen y Sinor. Very high in administration. And just now, very concerned about something, although he hid his concern well. Alex had snapped to a kind of seated 'attention' the moment his face appeared on the screen.
"Alexander, Hypatia, we're going to be sending you a long file of stills and holos," Professor Barton began. "But for now, the object you see here on my desk is representative of our problem."
The 'object' in question was a perfectly lovely little vase. The style was distinctive; skewed, but with a very sensuous sinuousity, as if someone had fused Art Nouveau with Salvador Dali. It seemed, as nearly as Tia could tell from the transmission, to be made of multiple layers of opalescent glass or ceramic.
It also had the patina that only something that has been buried for a very long time achieves. Or something with a chemically faked patina. But would the professor himself have called them if all he was worried about were fake antiquities? Not likely.
The only problem with the vase, if it was a genuine artifact, was that it did not match the style of any known artifact in any of Tia's files.
"You know that smuggling and site-robbing has always been a big problem for us," Professor Barton continued. "It's very frustrating to come on a site and find it's already been looted. But this, this is doubly frustrating. Because, as I'm sure Hypatia has already realized, the style of this piece does not match that of any known civilization."
"A few weeks ago, hundreds of artifacts in this style flooded the black market," Sinor said smoothly. "Analysis showed them to be quite ancient, this piece for instance was made some time when Ramses the Second was Pharaoh."
The professor was not wringing his hands, but his distress was fairly obvious. "There are hundreds of these objects!" he blurted. "Everything from cups to votive offerings, from jewelry to statuary! We not only don't know where they've come from, but we don't even know any thing about the people that made them!"
"Most of the objects are not as well-preserved as this one, of course," Sinor continued, sitting with that incredible stillness that only a professional politician or actor achieves. "But besides being incredibly valuable, and not incidentally, funneling money into the criminal subculture, there is something else rather distressing associated with these artifacts."
Tia knew what it had to be as soon as the words were out of the man's mouth. Plague.
"Plague," he said solemnly. "So far, this has not been a fatal disease, at least, not to the folk who bought these little trinkets. They have private physicians and in-house medicomps, obviously."
High families, Tia surmised. So the High Families are mixed up in this.
"The objects really aren't dangerous, once they've been through proper decontam procedures," the professor added hastily. "But whoever is digging these things up isn't even bothering with a run under the U V gun. He's just cleaning them up."
Tia winced inwardly, and saw Alex wince. To tell an archeologist that a smuggler had 'cleaned up' an artifact, was like telling a coin collector that his nephew Joey had gotten out the wire brush and shined up his collection for him.
"Cleaning them up, putting them in cases, and selling them." Professor Barton sighed. "I have no idea why his helpers aren't coming down with this. Maybe they're immune. Whatever the reason, the receivers of these pieces are, they are not happy about it, and they want something done."
His expression told Tia more than his words did. The High Families who had bought artifacts, they must have known were smuggled and possibly stolen, and some members of their circle, had gotten sick. And because the Institute was the official organization in charge of ancient relics, they expected the Institute to find the smuggler and deal with him.
Not that any of them would tell us how and where they found out about these treasures. Nor would they ever admit that they knew they were gray market, if not black. And if they'd stop buying smuggled artifacts, they wouldn't get sick.
But none of that meant anything when it came to the High Families, of course. They were too wealthy and too powerful to ever find themselves dealing with such simple concepts as cause and effect.